Month: April 2011

"Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense." ~ Ralph Waldo EmersonA…

Happy was the hunting.-Euripides ("The Bacchae")Yesterday I had my very first Greek Easter; the day was full of roasted lamb, folk music, and a language I don't quite understand. But it was fun, strange, confusing, slightly terrifying (imagine being told that when Greeks try to have their annual festivities, the cops sometimes appear....because passersby think…

The aim of life is appreciation; there is no sense in not appreciating things.-Gilbert K. ChestertonToday I biked the 4 miles uphill to campus, taught an intermediate Russian class for a friend who was taking her Ph.D. exams and then went to a dissertation workshop. Afterwards, inspired by my new "let's get this thing done"…

The outsider may indeed wonder at this seeming much ado about nothing. What a tempest in a tea-cup! he will say. But when we consider how small after all the cup of human enjoyment is, how soon overflowed with tears, how easily drained to the dregs in our quenchless thirst for infinity, we shall not…

On his way to the kitchen, he stopped at the closet and took an accounting of the coats, then he hurried on to the kitchen, where everything was as it had been a few hours earlier. He was that future self he had many times foretold but always dismissed as an impossibility. It was dizzying.…

"I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again." -Oscar WildeWith this Oscar Wilde quote, I welcome you to my world. You'd be surprised sometimes how big a difference one little comma seems to make. I am,…

I'm the smartest little geisha in Japan.-Sidney Jones ("The Geisha")One of the best things about the department I'm in is that there's a real sense of community: the graduate students know and like each other. We respect each other's work. Besides seminars, which yours truly is no longer taking, the main forum for sharing our…

A Pang is more conspicuous in SpringIn contrast with the things that singNot Birds entirely -- but Minds --Minute Effulgencies and Winds --When what they sung for is undoneWho cares about a Blue Bird's Tune ---Emily DickinsonLately, I've been all about kumquats. It's my love of sour things; I just can't get enough. Plus, the…

My older sister has entire kingdoms inside of her, and some of them are only accessible during certain seasons, in certain kinds of weather. One such melting occurs in summer rain, at midnight, during the vine-green breathing time right before sleep. You have to ask the right question, throw the right rope bridge, to get…

All over the island there was a burgeoning of graffiti that took merry or malicious advantage of the the fact that the Italians could not decipher the Cyrillic (Greek) script. They mistook Rs for Ps, did not know that Gs can look like Ys or inverted Ls, had no idea what the triangle was, thought…